one year of arm stuff – part 9 – accessibility is a thing though! what about adaptive devices?

Okay so this is as good a place as any for this disclaimer: I am sharing my specific personal experience with disability, not speaking to the experience of everyone with any related or similar-sounding disabillities. I have lived with this particular disability for one year; i do not have a lifetime of experience, and additionally, I have been told by my medical team that I need to keep pushing myself to use my recovering arm as much as I can, to help my brain and my new nerves connect properly. I have not had the time and am not supposed to go all in on adapting my whole life to this condition, as we expect my condition to change. This is a unique and different experience of the loss of use of one’s dominant hand and cannot be treated as universal. People are experts in their own conditions and experiences and don’t you DARE use what I write here to make another disabled person feel like shit.

nerve-graft georg is an outlier adn should not be counted

But also I am faced every day with the infinite depths of my own internalized ableism, and I know for certain that it laces its poison into everything I do and every thought i have about what I am going through. If I am putting things in this essay that actively misrepresent you, another disabled person, please do reach out and tell me so I can try and make it better. the balance between my personal experience and the general inclination of the public to universalize any new fact they learn is a tough one to keep always.

Okay, with that out of the way, a few thoughts on adaptive tools, lifestyle changes, etcetera:

They are at least 50% awful, marginally useful, hugely frustrating, and deeply paternalizing and condescending.

There are also some real miracles out there, amazing devices and tools and software and techniques and so forth!

And almost none of it is easy to use right out of the gate. Everything has a learning curve. I have constantly been doing the math on how much time I can afford to spend on learning something vs how much time it will save me once i know how to use it, especially in the changing context of my condition and recovery.

For example: one-handed typing.

Since I knew from May that I would be going into a period of left-hand-dominantness, I had five months to start training myself to function with my left hand. One of my biggest concerns was typing. Prior to my fingers growing weak, I had been a 140word-per-minute typist. I could touch-type at a high speed with good accuracy still and it was a huge boon to me professionally in my admin-heavy dayjob, and personally in my text correspondence and self publishing and self promotion practices online. I would have said I could type almost as fast as I could think.

So the first order of business was figuring out how fast I could get with just my left hand. And I started the journey down the rabbit hole of one-handed keyboard approaches.

This is where a key point from my disclaimer should come back to you: we expect my condition to change. While I may never type at 140wpm again, I did hope to bring my right hand back to the keyboard eventually. And I didn’t want to throw out all the touch typing knowledge that I already had – the left hand wrangles a LOT of typing and a lot of keyboard shortcuts and being able to do those without looking still had some benefit.

So right away I knew I wasn’t interested in a bespoke keyboard layout.

Which is good, because as far as I could tell, they cost around $2k canadian on average.

And they all have their own unique different key layouts.

And they all seem to be made by companies less than ten years old, meaning there’s no way to know if they’ll exist to make a replacement if mine is lost or broken in the future.

And actually this all seems really fucking stressful? No transferrable learning between them all, twenty different layouts out there, and almost none made by major reputable keyboard companies? With something as core a skill to me as typing, the thought of relearning it from scratch only to have the tool I learned go obsolete, locking me into a cycle of having to restart over and over and over again…

And additionally, I also wanted to be able to type at a friend’s house on their keyboard. I want to be able to function on the standard keyboards I can expect to encounter out in the world. That felt infuriating to give up!

But then again, some of these layouts looked ingenious. If this was something I was at all able to think of as a fun experiment, I would have loved trying a few different layouts, especially the chord typing stuff. That sounds so smart and efficient! So ergonimic! So cool! Such a fun thing to investigate!

But financially and emotionally I did not have the budget for that angle.

So I committed to learning to type one-handed on a QWERTY keyboard. I’m not the first and there’s a lot of great resources out there including typing training! And one thing people talked about in their discussions of this was wanting smaller keyboards, so that it was easy to reach from A to P with a single hand. That made some sense to me, so I started looking into smaller keyboards.

Well the internet would love to sell me a 60% sized handbuilt custom switches beautiful keycaps gaming/mechanical keyboard! For $400+!

And it turns out that’s actually not even solving my problem – most keyboards online labled as “small” are smaller because they are missing keys (such as the numpad) not because the keys themselves are smaller and take up any less space. Trying to find a keyboard with a reasonable distance from A to P turned out to be a huge quest! In the end I settled on a Perixx mini usb keyboard; I can’t quite reach A to P with my pinkie and index fingers, but nearly, and it was better than anything else I tried.

So here you can see where despite this whole situation knocking me on my ass emotionally, I’m still operating with both enormous privilege – I expect to recover function, so I don’t NEED to fully adapt to one-handedness; and a fair amount of internalized ableism – I don’t WANT to use the weird keyboards, I want to use the “normal” keyboards that everyone else uses, what do you MEAN the specialized keyboards aren’t given the same mass market support, etc.

And that, my friends, has been the arc of recovery for me. The huge emotional rollercoaster of facing this new disability; the true but HOW true fact that I will be less disabled in this way in a few years; the fear and frustration of how I interface with the world changing; the internalized ableism that resents this change and is also, and this is the kicker, extremely embarrassed by it.

Learning to type one-handed was hard. I worked hard to get to half my prior speed and my accuracy was shit and it was really hard work on my left wrist and arm. I used typing training, and when I went back to work I just sort of brute-forced it, until I was able to bring my right hand back in a one-finger hunt-and-peck way.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to focus on the typing, though, as I had to relearn how to do, as mentioned previously, everything else as well.



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